Nicholas Clark prepares himself to release perl 5.8.2,
which should fix the binary compatibility issue raised last week between 5.8.0 and 5.8.1.
The discussions are highly technical,
since the fix should preserve binary compatibility and at the same time preserve the security feature (the hash seed randomization) which was introduced in 5.8.1 and that broke binary compatibility.

With all those version number increments around, a question was raised : should perl's internal version number be incremented just after the release of the previous version, or just before the release of the new version ? Several arguments were raised. Usually, the tradition is to bump up the version number before the first release candidate.

Meanwhile, Randal Schwartz notices that the CPAN shell of perl 5.8.0 reports AutoLoader as to be upgraded since 5.8.1 is out. Andreas Koenig agrees that the shell should be silent about core modules that are not (yet) dual-lived on CPAN.

Stas Bekman reported that under mod_perl, built with perl 5.8.1 on Linux, the perl built-in getppid() doesn't return the actual PPID of the httpd process, as it should. This was the consequence of a change in perl 5.8.1, that now caches the result of getppid(2) in an interpreter variable, which is not updated when apache forks. (The rationale behind this change is that the implementation of getppid(2) on Linux is not POSIX-compliant when it comes to threads, and that Perl must be POSIX compliant when it can.) Rafael Garcia-Suarez, responsible for the PPID caching, provided a patch to mod_perl to fix this, and noted that a similar problem potentially occurs with the $$ special variable (although it was already correctly handled by mod_perl.)

Abigail filed bug #24204 : older versions of Perl allowed you to dup STDERR for reads, but newer versions (i.e. 5.8.x) don't. This disallow the trick to open STDERR for reading from the keyboard when standard input has been redirected to read from a file.

The discussion continues on the cleverness of Unix tricks, how and why they should be supported by perl, and (permitted by Mark-Jason Dominus' digging skills) POSIX compliance.

Following a suggestion by Alex Hudson, support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets were implemented. Those are basically like regular named Unix domain sockets, but their name begins with a \0, and they don't live in the filesystem.

David Dyck found that the perl parser was fooled by non-existent filetest operators (such as -F for example.) (bug #24212.) This was fixed by Rafael.

This week's summary was once again written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are published weekly on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Corrections and comments are welcome.